This site was constructed to assist Shimer College alumni and students in understanding the future developments of the College. All information, thoughts, and opinions are welcome. If you'd like to join please email me at saradevil at g mail .

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Friday, May 10, 2013

The Founding of Shimer College: A Tale of Two Tales

To anyone who has been associated with Chicago's Shimer College, the story of its founding is probably familiar: in May 1853, two young teachers, Frances Wood and Cindarella Gregory,
came out from upstate New York to the tiny frontier town of Mount
Carroll, Illinois, to start a "seminary" (not entirely unlike a high
school) that had been chartered by the state legislature the year
before. Nominally governed by a Board of Trustees but effectively run by
the two teachers, the school moved into its own building in 1854. A few
months after that, the struggling school was given up for dead by its
Trustees, and placed fully into the hands of Misses Wood and Gregory.

That is the well-worn tale of how this plucky little college got its start. It is not wrong, and can be verified by consulting contemporary newspaper accounts, as well as the letters and journal of Miss Wood herself. But it isn't the only story.

The second story of Shimer's founding varies a bit, but goes something like this: The
overambitious townspeople of Mount Carroll started a seminary in 1852,
but were unable to get it off the ground -- a common pattern across the
Old Northwest at this time. In 1853, completely independently, Misses
Wood and Gregory arrived in town and started a private school. Their
school prospered, and observing the teachers' administrative prowess,
the despairing Trustees asked them to take over the Trustees' stillborn
school; the teachers graciously accepted the charge.

To be sure, this second story is wrong. Wood and Gregory were part of
the Mount Carroll Seminary from the very day (May 11, 1853) when they
taught their first class. Yet we can find this story as far back as 1857, signed by none other than John Wilson, who had chaired the Board of Trustees during the school's difficult first months of operation. And we find it again, in 1869, in a report
submitted to the Illinois Superintendent of Public Instruction-if not
directly from the pen of Mrs. Shimer (née Wood) herself, surely at least
prepared under her close supervision.

So, why is this utterly nonfactual story coming from such reliable sources?

We may find the beginning of the answer in a key distinction in 19th-century
private education: between "venture" or "select" schools (often little
more than one or two teachers hanging out a shingle) and "proper"
state-chartered institutions overseen by boards of trustees. (For
discussions of this, see e.g. Tolley 2002, Katz 1975.) Agency and gender
come into this distinction as well: a select school would naturally be
governed by its teacher or teachers, often female; but a proper seminary or college was governed by its almost invariably male trustees.

Thus, when the Trustees relinquished control in 1855, the Mount
Carroll Seminary found itself in a treacherous position. Abandoned by
its Board, it could only move forward under the direct governance of its
teachers. Yet if it was perceived as merely a teacher-run
school, it would soon lose the prestige it needed to survive and grow.
It needed to somehow be both things at once: a joint proprietorship and a
"proper" school working to the highest standard.

Understanding this contradiction, we can understand the two
contradictory stories of Shimer's founding: if the narrator wanted to
emphasize the prestige of being a proper state-chartered institution,
the simple factual narrative served just fine. But when emphasizing the
agency and authority of Misses Wood and Gregory, the second narrative
served better - and for good measure, captured the real power dynamics of the first years much more accurately.

It is thus unsurprising that the second narrative first emerges in 1857, when the town was wracked
by scandalous accusations against Wood and Gregory, and the Seminary's
supporters needed to shore up their moral authority (for more on this,
see Malkmus 2003).

There is an underlying tension here, between Shimer as an institution
(embodied by the first narrative) and Shimer as the work of its people
(embodied by the second narrative), that can be traced through all of
the school's 160 years. From time to time - as in 1967, or 2010
- when things have become a little bit unbalanced, a crisis has ensued.
In the present day specifically, the Trustees' legal authority stands
in tension with the "moral suasion" exercised by Shimer's radically
democratic Assembly.
And just as with the two contradictory tales of Shimer's founding, we
could construct two entirely contradictory (but equally accurate)
accounts of the college as it exists today.

This suggests that Shimer's ability to strategically balance between
two contradictory identities has played a key role in this tiny school's
improbable 16-decade run. This may also help to explain why Shimer has
also remained so very small for all these years: this kind of ambiguity becomes harder to sustain when expanding beyond the human scale.